Liz Lochhead Five Plays (NHB Modern Plays)

By Liz Lochhead

Five plays from the makar (national poet) of Scotland, one of the country's best-known (and best-loved) living playwrights.
Liz Lochhead is the author of many highly inventive original plays, adaptations and translations, all crafted with her special blend of the vividly colloquial and the energetically poetic. This volume brings together five of her best original plays ranging over three decades and several, contrasting styles.
Her first play, Blood and Ice (1982), is about the creation of Frankenstein, and weaves a spider's web of connections between the literary monster and Mary Shelley's own turbulent life.
The modern classic Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1987) retells the familiar tale of enmity between Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots, with Lochhead's own brand of ferocious iconoclasm and boundless wit.
Quelques Fleurs (1991) is a portrait of a marriage, both funny and tragic, and told through interlaced monologues.
The last two plays, Perfect Days (1998) and Good Things (2004), mark a woman's fear of turning, respectively, forty and fifty. In the first, Barbs, 39, a celebrity hairdresser, determines to do something to drown out the ticking of her biological clock. In the second, Susan, 49, sets out to find love the second (or is it third or fourth?) time round'
This rich collection of plays carries a new and candid introduction by the author, specially written for the volume.
'Funny, feisty, female, full of feeling' Liz Lochhead possesses the deeply Scottish qualities of independence, inquisitiveness and inventiveness' Carol Ann Duffy

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Release date: Nov 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781780014012

Liz Lochhead

Liz Lochhead was born in Motherwell in 1947. While studying at the Glasgow School of Art she began to write seriously, gradually losing her way with her initial dream of becoming a painter. Her first book of poetry, Memo for Spring, was published in 1972 and sold 5,000 copies. The Scottish-Canadian Writers Exchange Fellowship,1978–9, marked her transition to full-time writer. She has since published several plays and poetry collections including A Choosing and most recently Fugitive Colours. Liz Lochhead was Scots Makar from 2011–2016.

Book preview

BLOOD AND ICE

Introduction

Blood and Ice, my first play, was performed in its first full incarnation at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 1982 at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh with Gerda Stevenson perfectly cast as Mary. She was lovely. Young, heartbreakingly young was how she played it, in love with a poet and with a poetic ideal, earnest, passionately enquiring, passionately committed to living a life that secretly terrified her.

Nevertheless, the play, even by its kindest critics – and, yes, there were some of those – could not possibly be called an unqualified success. It was far too long for one thing, and was, literally, all over the place. I, for one, must admit that I can’t, now, make head or tail of the original script, although within its excesses I can see it also contains what proved to be the still-beating heart of the whole creature, which is an exploration of the sources, and the consequences for its creator, of an enduring and immortal myth.

Mary Godwin Shelley lived at the cusp of reason and romanticism. She was the daughter of two great Age of Reason radical philosophers of freedom: William Godwin, author of Political Justice, and Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a founding feminist who died of puerperal fever just one week after giving birth to Mary. This legacy weighed heavily upon the child. As did, later, her own female biological destiny.

So much for free love. From the age of sixteen, when she ran away with him, married already as he was, until the death of Shelley eight years later when she was only twenty-four, she herself was almost constantly either pregnant, recovering from miscarriage or mourning the death of a child. (Only one, the delicate Percy Florence, was to survive into adulthood.) So many deaths. The suicides of her own Shelley-obsessed sister and Shelley’s deserted wife were sore enough but, far worse, the deaths of so many little innocents – their own, and the child of her stepsister and Byron too, all dragged around Europe in that ultimate romantic pursuit of their progenitors. No surprise perhaps that, prescient as she must have been – many, though not all, of these griefs lay ahead of her – this particular seventeen-year-old girl should have come up with a deep-felt fantasy of a new way of creating life. She was already, I’m sure, subconsciously aware of pushing herself beyond her own natural boundaries. Therefore the myth emerged as far from Utopian, but one of horror and terror of Science, a myth that remains potent for our nuclear age, our age of astonishment and unease at the fruits of perhaps-beyond-the-boundaries genetic experimentation.

That garbled first script of mine nevertheless contains, more or less verbatim, many of the scenes which are still extant in this version, the umpteenth and, I have promised myself, final version, which was completed for a 2003 production in the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh instigated by, and directed by, Graham McLaren, with whom in the last decade I have collaborated on several versions of classic plays for Theatre Babel.

Many young directors, many young actors, university students and struggling new fringe companies have, since 1982, taken on the challenge of this play. I have met quite a few since who were keen to tell me: ‘This was the first play I found for myself and just knew I had to direct it’; or ‘I played Byron’; or ‘I was Shelley’; or ‘I loved playing Mary.’ Many of these productions, the ones I saw at any rate, had wonderful moments. They’d fire me up and get it going again for me. I got on with trying to write other plays, but, all through the 1980s, like a dog returning to its own vomit, I’d go back to it, trying, abortively, to solve the problem of the structure, find what would finally seem the satisfactory form, keeping up the pursuit myself – for its own sake, whether there was an upcoming production or not – happily scribbling away through long lonely nights, just as obsessively, I had to own, as half-mad Frankenstein himself labouring with his unlovely creation, looking for the spark of life.

That spark came towards the end of the decade when, in 1988, David McVicar, now world-famous as a director of opera, but then a second-year student at Glasgow’s Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, phoned me up and said he wanted to direct the play and had a cast together for a production at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

I remember saying, ‘Don’t do it. Yes, it has great ideas in it, and a couple of great scenes, but it doesn’t actually work.’

David said, ‘I know, but I think I can see what’s wrong with it. Can we have a coffee and talk?’

I met David. Then went to a rehearsal and fell in love with the cast. It had to be a real ensemble piece and they were a real ensemble. So young, so talented and full of fire. I felt: hey, this lot might actually be about to crack it…

They got me doing, for nothing of course, but happily, obsessively again, loads and loads of work, more midnight oil, on a new script, one very, very like this one published here.

David McVicar’s production in its Edinburgh Fringe Scout Hall venue was thrilling. It was alive! Candlelit, and in 1960’s cheesecloth shirts and loon pants and simple long hippy-chick dresses for the girls, it had an amazing coup de théâtre when, from under the alpine peaks of an unmoving heap of muslin, the Creature, at the end of the first act, naked and beautiful as a baby, suddenly stood up and made the audience gasp – and terrified Mary into sitting down to write.

The cast were fantastic. Wendy Seager’s Mary, Daniela Nardini’s Claire (for the first time not merely an annoying idiot of a millstone for Mary but also passionate, and pitiable, a convincingly whole, if not well-rounded, person asserting, painfully, her own right to love), John Kazek’s brooding Byron and John Straiton’s incandescent Shelley were all so young and so beautiful they had charm enough to make us actually care about this set of self-indulgent, if brilliant, adventurers.

They were invited to perform their production at the Traverse that autumn, and RSAMD gave them leave of absence from the final year of their course to do so. It was sold out and there were queues for returns. When they had graduated, Blood and Ice was the first production of David McVicar’s far too short-lived touring company Pen Name.

A ghost, for me, was laid to rest.

When, half a dozen years ago, Graham McLaren came to me wanting to do Blood and Ice on the big stage of Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum, I said, ‘… yes – but, oh, it’s practically impossible to bring off, the actors must be really, really young, and also credibly these brilliant poets, and be gorgeous, and charming, especially Shelley, whom I haven’t ever managed to make so enough in the script, and they must all be human and vulnerable, even Byron – and you’ll have to make sure they find a lot of laughter and lightness in the opening scene, and some playful, joyful and easy sensuality too, because there is so little of that shown as the play begins at the point the cracks are appearing, and because there is so much darkness ahead in the journey. And, Graham, for the big stage, I’ll really have to have a wee go at the structure…’

Graham’s production, with another lovely young cast, was very beautiful, very spooky, very romantic and made me very happy.

It’s exactly thirty years since I first took down from a library shelf Muriel Spark’s Child of Light, her wonderful biography of Mary Shelley, and, shortly after, began my own pursuit. Could I make a play…? Naively, I was, at the time, quite blithely unaware that I wasn’t the first, and certainly wouldn’t be the last, to be fired by the dramatic possibilities of this moment in history, that iconic stormy summer of 1816 by the shores of the lake and beneath the high Alps. There is, apparently, a 1969 novel called A Single Summer with L.B. by Derek Marlowe, which since someone told me about it twenty-odd years ago, I’ve always meant to read. And now that I really am finally through with these characters for myself, I will. There was a fairly terrible Ken Russell film called Gothic in 1986; and also Howard Brenton’s 1989 stage play Bloody Poetry, which focused on Shelley’s radical romantic politics – and Byron. But, as for Blood and Ice, this published version is the very last word from me on these characters, this particular dilemma.

Unless, David McV, you know someone you can persuade this old play of mine could be a brilliant, blazing brand-new opera…?

Liz Lochhead

July 2009

This version of Blood and Ice was first performed at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, on 24 October 2003, with the following cast:

Characters

MARY SHELLEY

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

CLAIRE CLAIRMONT

LORD BYRON

ELISE, a maid

THE CREATURE

NURSE

ACT ONE

In an England of darkness and loneliness, MARY SHELLEY, a young widow in her late twenties, is stretched out asleep.

The ‘nightmare is upon her’, the image is that of the famous Fuseli painting and there is perhaps an actual and physical manifestation of the smothering homunculous on her chest that appears momentarily in a flash of lightning and disappears again in the beat of darkness that follows it. Certainly, shadows move. A dream whisper breaks her sleep.

CREATURE’S VOICE. Why did you make me?… Frankenstein?

MARY wakes with a gasp of fear. Dead silence. She breathes, listening. Wind blows the window open, it bangs once, twice, three times. She gets up and, barefoot, pads across the floorboards to fasten it, her relief palpable.

Ideal or important pieces of set and furniture are a double-sided oval mirror on a stand (a cheval glass) and a nightmarish perhaps oversized rocking horse. It rocks now of its own will, but when MARY turns around, it stops.

MARY (sighing relief). Nothing.

CREATURE’S VOICE (a whisper). Frankenstein?

MARY. Such dreams.

Night after night, such bad dreams.

I go to my new book, for I will write it, I must!

And dreams of that old one, the one that’s done and dusted, in print and out there in the world, making whatever stumbling way it can, for better or worse – dreams of my infamous creation come back to haunt me.

Come back to haunt me and I cannot shake it off.

I have the strongest presentiment something terrible is about to happen.

Last night I dreamed, I dreamed I was seventeen, we were back in Poland Street, I found my little baby, my firstborn, it was not dead but… cold merely. Shelley and I rubbed it before the fire and it lived! Awoke and found no baby.

No Shelley.

CREATURE’S VOICE. Why?

MARY. Don’t think of him.

When they found him washed up, his eyes, his face, all parts of him… not protected by his clothes were eaten away, they only knew him by – in his pocket they found… that volume of Keats he carried with him always.

Sometimes I wake up. Cold. Bathed in a moon sweat. And I rub myself slowly to life again.

The dead of night.

Don’t think of him.

More movement, shadows, and suddenly:

SHELLEY’S VOICE. Oh, Mary! You don’t seem to care how much it grieves me that you won’t sail with me…

Come and see her.

New arrived from Genoa, The Ariel, the bonniest boat that ever sailed the seas!

MARY. Don’t think of him.

She goes to her writing desk with great effort of will.

Loud cries of ‘Mama, Mama, Mama’ and suddenly a very flesh and blood bonny wee six-year-old CHILD with girlish soft long fair hair, runs in, capering with a toy windmill or a ball, some toy in motion. MARY, laughing, runs and catches him up and tickles him. He giggles and squirms.

Oh, Perciflo, you rascal! Your mama’s best boy, her only! What am I to do with you! Your mama is busy, she must write her new storybook and earn lots of pennies for her big bonny best boy!

Nurse! Nurse! Come and fetch him, please!

NURSE appears, a quick in-and-out shadow of a girl who takes the CHILD, kicking, under her arms, and exits with him. MARY calls offstage after them.

See Percy Florence gets to bed again and has himself a proper night’s sleep – and no argument about it, my naughty little, my nice little, my naughty little man!

Alone again, she sits at her work.

My sweet, sweet boy, my only consolation…

Oh, how am I to take care of you, all by myself?

This new book of mine will save us both. Must! The Last Man… such a good fantastical idea for a philosophical and terrifying novel. If I work constantly on this one and manage a mere thousand words a day, then in only a hundred days… allow two more months for copying and revisions and… surely on the strength alone of the stir that surrounded my last publication –

CREATURE’S VOICE. Frankenstein, why did you make me?

MARY. Well, it wasn’t for the money anyway. Nor for the wager, or the challenge of the competition –

Shadows move.

BYRON’S VOICE. I’ll set us a little contest. Why should we content ourselves with translated, traditional horrors, all bookish and stilted. Home-grown ones are the best. Who can make the most stirring unnatural tale?

MARY. There were three of us.

SHELLEY’S VOICE. Mary!

BYRON’S VOICE. Mary!

CLAIRE’S VOICE (a giggle). Mary!

MARY (as if silencing her). There were three of us!

Shadows move.

ELISES’S VOICE. Mrs Shelley, madame! Milord Byron’s man says he is here to fetch both the ladies –

MARY firmly suppresses these voices from the past.

MARY. There was Shelley… and Byron… and me.

CREATURE’S VOICE overlaps and echoes.

CREATURE’S VOICE. Me… Me… Me!… Tell me about the night you made me, Frankenstein.

MARY blows out the candle, casts off her heavy, dark dressing gown and is a laughing eighteen-year-old in white muslin back in Switzerland, 1816 – summer, daytime, in a totally bright and different light. The lake and Mont Blanc above it.

Wet and naked, capering, SHELLEY, a boy of twenty-two, wrapped only in a lace tablecloth, spins her round and kisses her.

SHELLEY. Mary Godwin, you are such a prude! Such blushes! Come here until I kiss them better.

MARY. Shelley, how could you? Honestly… put some clothes on.

SHELLEY. Swimming, Mary. I want to learn to swim.

MARY. Walking naked across the terrace, all tangled up with weeds and –

SHELLEY. I forgot. I forgot they were coming.

MARY. You did not! You only wanted to be outrageous –

SHELLEY. Oh, what does it matter, Mary!

MARY. It matters to me! She was a great friend of my mother’s.

SHELLEY. Old humbugs, pretending to be shocked!

MARY (fighting laughter). I thought La Gisborne would have an apoplexy!

SHELLEY. And the other old goose! Lord, I thought she was going to burst her goitre.

MARY (laughing). Thank goodness they’ve gone! They didn’t stay a minute after your grand apparition, though! It was make excuses and off before they’d drained their first teacup. Oh, Shelley, how could you have! Naked!

SHELLEY. I covered myself! Just as soon as I saw you had company to tea. I had two choices. I could brazen it out, or hide myself behind the maidservant. So I –

MARY. What Elise must have thought I cannot imagine!

SHELLEY. Oh, so not content with fretting over the old dowagers, now we are to agonise over the imagined offence to the servant girl! Well, at least we don’t have to worry about what the neighbours will say.

MARY. It’s his influence makes you so careless of the regard of others!

SHELLEY. No, Mary, you know I never cared for the world’s approval. Not in such… silly and private matters. And neither did you! The Mary I met…

MARY. Did not go deliberately out of her way to offend elderly ladies in such… silly and trivial ways!

SHELLEY. I covered myself. Dodging behind the maidservant, swaddling myself in her apron strings. I twirled around and, sleight of hand, snatched out the topmost tablecloth like a conjurer ere she put down the tea things and sat myself down, decently draped in dimity and lace, to adequate small talk amid the tinkling cups. I do not see how you can begin to complain of me!

MARY. I was surprised enough when they called in the first place. You know how our position makes us vulnerable to… of course, Maria Gisborne was a follower of Mama’s, certainly she is of more liberal opinions than most middle-aged matrons, but it was kind of her to call.

SHELLEY. Kind! Now don’t you think Mrs Gisborne might just have been moved by curiosity, not to speak of the passing expectation of perhaps a glimpse of our illustrious… no, our infamous neighbour?

MARY. Shelley, it was very kind –!

SHELLEY. So, they can certainly tell all the English Community that no, they never saw so much as an eyelash of Lord Byron…

He runs to the terrace door and throws off the tablecloth.

…but they saw every inch of Percy Shelley, the whole natural man!

MARY. Shelley!

SHELLEY (laughing). Mrs Gisborne! Come back! Maria! Look at me, am I not a pretty sight? Look what the sea threw up! What? You’ve never seen a naked man in all your sixty summers. She’s fainted, smelling salts? Come here, I’ll give you a sniff of the sea.

ELISE, the maid, enters from the terrace, exactly from where she’ll have had a good view of the naked SHELLEY. He is laughing and unabashed, she professionally deadpan. MARY is not amused.

ELISE. Madame? Shall I clear the tea things?

MARY. Yes, yes, you may, Elise, of course.

SHELLEY is still trailing the tablecloth.

SHELLEY. Yes, and bring in the brandy, Elise.

MARY. Oh no, dearest!

ELISE. Yes, sir.

She takes the tea tray and exits again to where she’s come from.

MARY. We do not take alcohol, you say yourself –!

SHELLEY. No, we have no need of intoxicants. A failure of the imagination I call it, but when we have guests –

MARY. No, Shelley, no brandy, not tonight, I don’t want him to come!

SHELLEY grabs her, spins round and hugs her in a mad dance, wrapping her up in the tablecloth too.

SHELLEY. Do we care anything for prudish old hypocrites?

MARY. No!

SHELLEY. Prime ministers and poltickers?

MARY. No!

SHELLEY. Papas who go back on every principle they have ever published and are suddenly scandalised by love freed from the shackles of marriage? What do we care for them?

MARY. Nothing!

SHELLEY. Less than nothing. Let love know no limits!

They twirl and kiss, euphoric.

MARY. Now, go and change!

SHELLEY. Come with me, Mary.

MARY. Change!

SHELLEY. C’mon, Mary…

MARY. I have to feed William!

SHELLEY. Kiss me.

They kiss.

MARY. Your lips are cold! Oh, Shelley, you made me shiver.

They kiss again, longer. An intrusion of movement in the shadows.

Who’s there?

Stillness. Silence.

SHELLEY. Nobody. It’s nothing. What’s the matter? Kiss me.

He kisses her again. She responds passionately. ELISE enters with brandy on a tray, and coughs.

ELISE. Madame…

MARY (embarrassed). Yes, Elise?

ELISE. Milord Byron’s man, madame, he says he has come to fetch you both.

MARY (to SHELLEY). You go!

SHELLEY. Mary! He’ll be offended…

MARY. You go with him.

SHELLEY. Mary –

MARY. I have to feed Willmouse.

SHELLEY. I’ll stay with you.

MARY. Go and sail with Byron on the lake. You know you want to.

SHELLEY. Tonight I promise you I’ll make you shiver, Mary.

Exit SHELLEY. From far away, calling:

CLAIRE. Elise! Elise!

ELISE begins to go. MARY stops her.

MARY. Oh, Elise!

ELISE. Yes, madame.

MARY. You must have thought Mr Shelley’s behaviour somewhat strange?

ELISE. No, madame.

MARY. Tell me, are you at home here, Elise?

ELISE shrugs.

ELISE. S’pose so, madame. I am at home. I was born here in Switzerland.

MARY. No, Elise, I meant… (In a blurt.) you must not be surprised at anything Mr Shelley does, he is… I think you know we are not, he is not bound by normal conventions, he cares nothing for them, neither of us do! But he is a good, good man, he is against all viciousness and cruelty and tyranny and ownership. What is nakedness compared to…

ELISE withholds her reassurance. Eventually:

ELISE (shrugging). It’s only nature, madame.

MARY. Thank you, Elise.

ELISE. May I go, ma’am?

ELISE begins to go again.

MARY. Oh, Elise! Elise, in the packing today, that arrived from England, there is such a pretty shawl… and a bonnet that – yes, I’m sure – would look very fetching on you!

ELISE. Thank you, madame.

CLAIRE (a voice still far away). Elise! Elise, where are you, you tiresome creature? Come and help me make myself pretty!

ELISE. Can I go, madame? Mam’zelle Claire, she –

MARY. Of course you may. And do take away the brandy, please, we’ll have no need of it this evening.

ELISE. Yes, ma’am.

MARY goes to the terrace and out. ELISE takes up the tray with the decanter again, murmurs under her breath, but quite audibly:

Yes, madame, no, madame, take it, leave it. A bonnet! A bonnet! Very fetching, I’m sure…

Exit ELISE.

Transition: lights change back to that opening scene, present time, again. Widow MARY, shawled, dressing-gowned, at her desk. There’s movement in the shadows again.

MARY. We were so happy then, always, Shelley and I, even with Claire, our ever-constant companion.

CREATURE’S VOICE. You should love this. The creator should not shun his creature.

MARY. Oh, Claire Clairmont, you were always so jealous of me. Everything I had, you had to have it too. Everything…

CREATURE’S VOICE. Why? Why?

MARY. Perhaps I am unjust to her? My millstone and my sister. Since I was three years old. My papa married her mama.

‘You are to be sisters now. Share your doll.’ It’s my doll. It’s my book. I’m clever!

‘You may be cleverer but I’m prettier, my mama says so. Your mama is dead.’

Mama. My dead mama. All the time of my growing up the legend of my dead mama. And she died giving birth to me.

Rivers of blood. I heard the cook tell the parlourmaid when she thought I wasn’t listening. Puppies at her breasts so they’d suck until the afterbirth came away. No use. She died.

CREATURE’S VOICE. Who made me? Who made This…? Frankenstein.

MARY. Oh, but Claire or no Claire, we were so happy then, always, that summer, Shelley and I, before he came!

She actually means BYRON, but then –

CREATURE’S VOICE. Frankenstein, why did you make me, why did you make me not beautiful?

Echo and fade. Lights change.

Back in sunlit Switzerland. CLAIRE, in petticoats, is having her lacing done up by ELISE, in obedient ladies-maid mode. ELISE has brought CLAIRE’s dress.

CLAIRE is young, radiant, overexcited.

CLAIRE. Tight! Tighter! Lace me nice and small, Elise! Make me beautiful.

MARY comes in from the terrace in her white muslin frock, eating an apple.

MARY. – And breathless!

CLAIRE. Not me! Now my hair. One hundred strokes so it’ll shine! Ow! Elise, you’re tugging. Give it to me. Clumsy! Mary, do you not think we are somewhat alike? Oui? Yes, we do resemble each other after all.

MARY. How could we, we are not sisters.

CLAIRE. Not in blood, no. But we are closer perhaps than sisters, oui? Haven’t we always shared everything?

MARY (murmurs). Since we were three years old…

CLAIRE. You love to write! And I love to write! You found a passionate poet to be your lover. And I –

MARY. Came with us!

CLAIRE. Mary! Tu n’est pas gentile! What else could I do? (Pause.) You are such a scarlet lady, Mary. And now I am scarlet too! We are two very scarlet ladies. Tongs, Elise!

MARY. I’m not!

ELISE. Madame. (Passes the tongs.)

CLAIRE. Oh yes, you are! In the world’s eyes. Not hot enough, silly girl, here! (Pause.) Mary found herself a young and beautiful and a passionate poet to be her heart’s companion. And Claire found herself a… not quite so young but quite as beautiful and quite as passionate a poet to be hers!

MARY. Oh, Claire, be careful!

Elise, do go fetch me that ribbon from next door, please.

ELISE goes, then – at CLAIRE, urgently:

Why, this morning at dawn I saw you running through the gap in the hedges back through the garden to the kitchen quarters, all disordered with your hair loose, losing your shoe like Cinderella –

Re-enter ELISE unseen by MARY. Stands. Listens.

And that maid presented it back to you with such an ironical little bob of a curtsey and the most insolent smirk on her face.

CLAIRE. So the servants see we too have a little blood in our veins…

ELISE. Ribbon, madame!

CLAIRE. Probably jealous, aren’t you, Elise! All England would be jealous of me if they knew. All the ladies in England, at least!

MARY. Jealous! To see you make a fool of yourself, throwing yourself at a man just because he’s a scandal – oh, and a famous poet!

CLAIRE. I love him. And I know he loves me. Such a scandal, though! Imagine! Peacocks, packing cases all over the quayside, monkeys escaping from their cages, a piano dangling in mid-air. And the ladies! All the ladies weeping oceans into their cambric handkerchiefs, pressing billets-doux on him, sending little black pageboys to shower him with locks of their hair. Do you know, Mary, some ladies even cut off –

MARY. There can be only one outcome of all this, Claire! He is married already!

CLAIRE (laughing). And you are an ’ippocreet!

ELISE. Careful, Madame Claire, these tongs are very hot!

CLAIRE. Byron loathes and detests Annabel with all his heart. Byron has far less truck with Annabel after only a month or two’s parting than Shelley has with his Harriet after nearly three years!

MARY. Harriet is the mother of his children. He cannot leave her destitute, his children bereft – I would not for a moment wish him to. Harriet is…

CLAIRE. His wife, n’est ce pas?

MARY (gentler). Claire, don’t let’s quarrel. I… I cannot bear it when we do.

CLAIRE. No. Don’t let’s quarrel, Mary. You are so good, of course you are not jealous. I was silly! Of course Shelley must care for Harriet. Oh, Mary! (Kisses her.) I want to love you, and Shelley and little William, and… oh, Mary, I feel as though my heart could burst. The moment I met my Albé, that very first instant –

MARY (bursts). Would you mother a fatherless child?

CLAIRE wavers, won’t answer for a beat, then:

CLAIRE. Mary, you do not know how cruel my life was, vraiment! You had Shelley to be your protector, I had no one… I told Byron, I wrote to him… once or twice, and told him what his poetry meant to me, how reading it had transformed my whole drab existence and that made him responsible for me – for the Creator should not shun his creature – and I… (Brazenly.) I – yes I did! – I arranged that we would go away together and be free and unknown and we could return the following morning!

Well, did not your mama defy convention so?

I am sure she thought it shameful that women must simper and sit in the chimney corner and make mimsy mouths and wait for men to decide to kiss them. I am sure she looked forward to a time when woman as well as man may freely state her desire.

MARY. Of course! But –

CLAIRE. But what? Everything your mother ever thought, everything she wrote – Your mama wanted that women should be free.

MARY. Do you want to be a mother? Because –

CLAIRE. There is no stronger bond between a man and a woman than the making of a child. It is only nature, Mary. (Pause.) I think… perhaps… it may have happened already. Oh – I’m sure not – don’t let’s quarrel! You said so